A weak U.S. jobs report caps a bad week for both the national and New Jersey economies as state gas prices spiked nearly 10% over the week amid the Iran conflict.
In addition, the Garden State contended with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate behind only California.
Figures that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released on March 6 show that the national workforce unexpectedly shrunk by 92,000 jobs in February.
The March 6 numbers are national and do not include a breakdown of the jobless figures for individual states. But preliminary numbers from earlier in the year show that in 2025, New Jersey’s workforce added just 9,000 jobs and edged up to a four-year high unemployment rate of 5.4%.
Only California had a higher unemployment rate at 5.5% as of December 2025, according to the most recent data available.
New Jersey’s sluggish job growth in 2025 continued a downward trend over several years. The state added nearly 64,200 jobs in 2023, but only 39,800 in 2024, according to data compiled by the New Jersey Department of Labor.
“Things are definitely cooling,” Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University, told NorthJersey.com in January.
The Daily Record, March 6, 2026